No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller by Harry Markopolos (rainbow fish read aloud .txt) 📗

“Count me in,” he said. “I got a fax machine at my place. Let’s go.” He left his beer and pizza on the bar, proving that he was a dedicated American citizen, and we drove to his office in his SUV. It turned out he was pretty angry with the government because of the Wall Street bailouts, so he was thrilled to participate in anything that would embarrass the SEC. I got on my cell phone with Zuckerman as we started sending documents from a fax machine on the first floor of the trucking company office. Finally, I thought, finally.

The fax machine stopped. We tried it again. It started, then cut out again. The owner shook his head and sighed. “I got another one upstairs that’s not so modern, but it tends to work better whenever we have a problem.” As we later learned, the problem wasn’t the fax machine; the ice storm was knocking out phone lines all over the state. But the second machine worked as long as we fed it continuously. It took more than an hour to get all the documents faxed successfully. While that was going on Zuckerman asked me, “Do you want to help me write this story?”

I’d been waiting for that opportunity for nine years. “You bet I do,” I said.

When we got back to the restaurant, I put whatever cash I had in my pocket on the bar and told Elaine, “This man eats and drinks as long as this holds out!”

So much was happening so fast. In addition to Gaytri, who was my personal lawyer, I called Phil Michael, an attorney who was representing several of my False Claims Act cases. He was in Mexico. He called me back but we had a poor connection. He told me I could talk about Madoff as much as I wanted to, but I couldn’t mention any of the other cases. Then I thought he said, “Cooperate with the press and milk the publicity.” In fact, that was exactly the opposite of what he’d said.

That night I never slept. I was too busy copying computer files containing Madoff case documents, e-mails, and SEC submissions to CD-ROMs in order to preserve evidence in case the SEC raided my home in a last-ditch attempt to destroy evidence. I also e-mailed files to my legal teams in Boston and New York and also to Taxpayers Against Fraud in Washington. Getting those e-mails out during the ice storm was quite a challenge and took hours longer than it would have if the weather had been cooperating.

The next morning I sent my wife, Faith, into Boston on the commuter rail carrying a set of very incriminating documents burned onto a CD. She carried it on her person all morning; then at lunchtime she surreptitiously made her way through the narrow, crowded streets of Boston’s Chinatown, where she clandestinely passed the CD to one of her trusted girlfriends. They met in a restaurant frequented almost solely by Chinese patrons. Unless the SEC somehow managed to trail her with Chinese Mandarin—speaking agency employees, they’d never be able to track that CD. I now had case documents spread safely up and down the East Coast between Boston, New York, and Washington. If the SEC tried anything illegal, it would only backfire on the agency once those documents started surfacing.

My brother hadn’t heard that Madoff had surrendered. His phone starting ringing at 6 A.M. the next morning with calls from media outlets who wanted to know if he was the Madoff whistleblower featured in the Wall Street Journal.After a half dozen calls he realized that the Journal was lying on his front porch and figured he’d better get up and find out exactly what I’d done this time.

I was barraged by phone calls, most of which I didn’t answer. But when I saw the phone number of the Boston office of the SEC, I figured I’d better pick it up. The caller was a person in that office other than Ed Manion, a person I knew well from the caller’s former job, and probably the last person I expected to make this particular phone call. This individual was risking their career, which was not something I would have believed was part of the person’s character. Obviously I can’t identify this individual, who warned me, “Harry, Operation Cover-Up has started here. They’re telling us we don’t know you, we never heard of you. I got a call from the senior staff five minutes ago telling me not to have any contact with you. Watch your back, buddy.”

Now my precautions of the previous night preparing my shotgun seemed vindicated. I was holed up in my office preparing documents all morning. Vans and cars were showing up in front of the house. Reporters were getting out and ringing the front doorbell (at least we hoped they were journalists and not SEC employees). I left my mother-in-law to answer the door and shoo reporters away. It was frightening each time she opened that front door. If they came in a TV news van and had TV cameras, that was actually a relief since we knew the SEC couldn’t carry out that elaborate a ruse. From our vantage point we could plainly see strange folks walking up and down the neighborhood knocking on my neighbors’ doors and asking questions. We live in the town center, so these folks were also canvassing the local merchants, no doubt asking questions about me. We hoped they were journalists and nothing more. It was a scary time for us, particularly when the school bus dropped the boys off that afternoon.

I also got several calls from a reporter at the Washington Post telling me that the SEC was denying the existence of a whistleblower. “They’re saying they get hundreds of thousands of whistleblower tips every year and they can’t investigate all of them and they don’t know anything about you.”

“Thank you,” I said, but I was thinking, Wait, just wait.